


Singularity

by standbyme



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: AU, M/M, upstairs!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-04
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 15:01:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standbyme/pseuds/standbyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Hikaru is lucky enough to be a dream of Pavel’s mind, then he won’t complain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singularity

I

“It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“That there was no uniwerse. You know, at one point.”

Hikaru forces his heavy eyelids open, little slivers staring at Pavel in the dark. Pavel is playing with the edge of the blanket, his finger tips following the bumps of the threads, the little places where the inner bits have shifted and left shallow craters.

Hikaru doesn’t say anything. Pavel glances at him, eyes reflecting the light from across the street at the Laundromat. A car goes by, its tires sighing over the road as it comes to a stop at the red light outside their building.

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” Pavel whispers, because its dark and things like tires sigh, so things like people whisper in the dark. Hikaru thinks about it.

“Yes.” He concludes, “It isn’t good to think about that too long, though. You start to get…I don’t know, depressed?”

Pavel shifts, rutting his bony, bare, shoulder into Hikaru’s side.  He fiddles with the blanket and, as Pavel usually does, either ignores or doesn’t recognize Hikaru’s subtle plea to _let it be_ andsleep.

“Hikaru, but really…” he starts and Hikaru just counts the cars that pass through the intersection. “…there was nothing there. That’s so weird.”

There is a sleepiness to Pavel’s voice that Hikaru loves. It is boyish and stubborn, and sometimes, Hikaru wants to physically lay his hand over Pavel’s eyes and say, like a mother, or an older brother, _let it be_. Pavel yawns his words instead.

“It’s so strange. There was no you or me…but maybe the idea was there? Do you think that, Hikaru? Do you think ideas and things were there when nothing was?”

“It was nothing, Pavel.” Hikaru exhales. Pavel shifts, flops onto his stomach restlessly and his toenail scratches at Hikaru’s calf, making his leg jerk.

“I think the idea was there. Of you and me.”   
  
Hikaru absently wonders how Pavel is so sure of things like this.

II

They eat Hikaru’s spaghetti at Pavel’s kitchen table.

“They say that there are two ways that it could all end.” Pavel conducts with his fork, swish, swish, through the air.

Hikaru drinks his milk quietly, lifts an eyebrow. He thought, after a week, they were done with this subject, but no.

It’s merely been dormant in Pavel’s head.

“One way,” Pavel begins, “is that the univwerse will keep going forever, and ewentually it will stop expanding.”

“The other?” Hikaru baits, and Pavel swallows a twirl of pasta.

“It will all contract – and become a singularity all over again – and then it will all happen. The uniwerse will be new.”

Seen-goo-lar-ee-tee

It dances out of Pavel like a verbal minuet.

“What determines that? The result.” Hikaru says, genuinely interested. Pavel stares at him and his hands go to the table.

“How much mass there is. If there isn’t enough, it stops, and if there is it will all become something new again.”

Hikaru is about to nod when Pavel says something infinitely more interesting.

“It’s a lot of responsibility, I think.”

Pavel dives back into his spaghetti before Hikaru can comment.

Hikaru feels his hand dip into sauce a little as he fixes his stare on Pavel contentedly eating his mediocre food.

“What do you mean by that?” Hikaru probes, his voice low and even.

Pavel looks up – doll faced, through long lashes – and tilts his head.

“It’s a lot of responsibility, I think, to contribute, because I don’t think it would be good if it all stopped.”

Hikaru wants to tell Pavel that his contributions mean nothing in the scheme of the universe, if only to stop him from worrying about something like that.

“I want there to be enough to start it over, so that we can be together again.” Pavel continues, “Sometimes, Hikaru, and do not laugh at me…” His cheeks get stained with pink but he is so serious. Hikaru couldn’t have laughed. “…sometimes it is like this uniwerse is mine…like because I am conscious it is my uniwerse, and without you – I would rather it stop forever than not have another uniwerse without you. If I am the only one who matters, if maybe all of this is something my mind makes up, I would want there to be enough of me with you to make it last for a hundred singularities. The idea of us.”

He finishes and Hikaru stares at him, dumbfounded.

There aren’t many people in this world – maybe a handful – who tell you things like that.

“There’ll be enough.” He adds and Pavel pushes his spaghetti around and smiles, still blushing, but refusing to look at him.

“It’s stupid.” He whispers in broad daylight. “I know the uniwerse isn’t mine.”

“No, it’s not.” Hikaru tells him firmly, but what he means is _i’ll give the universe to you._ “It isn’t at all Pavel.”

“It’s so weird.” Pavel licks his lips, takes a slice of white bread and messily puts butter onto it, his knife gouging it. He shakes his head, brow furrowing.

“It is.” Hikaru breathes, his mind reeling just a bit more than it was.

III

Unbelievably, Pavel falls asleep first.

Hikaru lies in bed and thinks about singularities, about the what ifs, about the beauty it would be to crawl into Pavel’s brain sometime for a short holiday. It’s like now that Pavel’s talked to him about the extreme concepts of thought and the universe he can sleep like a baby. That or his ten hour rehearsal, and the two hours of practicing he did after the dishes, and then the long bath he took.

Whatever the reason, Hikaru finds himself awake and alone with the bedroom that is becoming ‘theirs’.

With a bed that is not big enough anymore for some things, like Pavel’s star-fish way of sleeping.

Maybe it is enough though. Maybe this, this holding Pavel in the dark, is enough. Maybe it’s the clap of his hands when he watches Pavel perform, the waves of people who stand in ovation for him. It’s in the echoes of his piano, the spaghetti sitting in a Tupperware in the kitchen.

Hikaru decides then that it will be enough to start the universe over for Pavel, because Pavel wants that, and Pavel, for that brief moment, is like a sleeping god, or some kind of star falling to earth, something immense and powerful and myth-like.

Hikaru considers that maybe he’ll find out that one day Pavel himself spun everything like a spider, that he tied up all the loose ends so that he and Hikaru are always at the center of it, and everything is just a big wheel that turns around them. Pavel would do something like that, something so wonderful. If Hikaru is lucky enough to be a dream of Pavel’s mind, then he won’t complain.

Pavel sighs.

Hikaru runs a hand down between his shoulder blades.

It doesn’t matter, because Pavel owns his life now anyway. The grander schemes are just formalities.

Pavel is right, _maybe if I am all that matters_ , then nothing else does.

A hundred singularities – it sounds like the name of a song.

“So weird.” Hikaru says, not whispering, even though it is dark.

He imagines the world turning around the sun, like Pavel’s spaghetti turning around his fork.

Like the universe, like a kitchen table.

Like Pavel and Hikaru, and the idea of it all swimming in Pavel’s head like gulls on the bay.

Tires outside sigh. Somewhere, a star explodes, and another is born.  
  
There will be enough.


End file.
